Wicklund: ’It creates this barrier between the students and the police that makes it hard to know and report the full truth.’
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Pricier, But Not Safer
Students and open-records supporters say private colleges shouldn’t keep crime data secret.
By ANNA CAMP
It’s a paradox that leaves Gabe Wicklund frustrated and worried — not only as a journalist but also as a potential crime victim. Wicklund figures she and her fellow Frogs are paying lots more in tuition and fees at TCU than they would at a state university, but that they know far less than public-college students about potentially dangerous crime on their campus.
Wicklund, the former news editor and next editor-in-chief for the TCU Daily Skiff, has struggled and watched other Skiff staffers struggle for two years with attempts to get information on campus crimes from TCU police. Like all other universities, public or private, that participate in federal student aid programs, TCU police are required by a federal law called the Clery Act to provide some information to the public — mainly crime logs with bare-bones information, campus-wide alerts in certain situations, and statistical information sent to the federal Department of Education. The act was passed specifically to remedy the refusal of many colleges to level with students and their families about the incidence of crime — in some cases including brutal murders and rapes — on their campuses.
However, the information that the Clery Act makes available is much less than what police departments at public universities, which are covered by state and federal open-records laws, are required to provide. And the difference is one that some critics believe should be challenged. If a police agency, even on a private university campus, enforces public law using state-licensed police officers and state-granted police powers, they reason, that agency should be subject to the same open-records laws.
“The fact that our police departments can keep crime on our campus private gives them more leverage ... and they can pick and choose what they tell us,” Wicklund said. “It creates this barrier between the students and the police that makes it hard to know and report the full truth.” It also produces an atmosphere void of openness and trust, she said, created by the very department that should be upholding those values.
Attorney David Donaldson of Austin, a board member of the Freedom of Information Foundation of Texas, said attention has been drawn to the situation by recent news stories, in Fort Worth Weekly and elsewhere, about widespread failures of Texas colleges to fully comply with the Clery Act, and about how campus police departments’ interpretations of the law have left students, for instance, with no information about date-rape attacks or high-crime areas on the edges of some campuses.
Recent court rulings in several states have also highlighted the lower level of public accountability required of campus police departments. In cases filed in Georgia, New York, Massachusetts, and Indiana, judges have repeatedly said that, under current law in those states, police records at private universities are private. In Texas, private-college police departments are allowed to withhold all details of crime information not required to be released by the Clery Act.
In some states — though not in Texas — the result of the rulings and press coverage has been the filing of legislation to bring college police departments more in line with other police agencies on public release of crime information. Open-records expert Carolyn S. Carlson, former national president of the Society of Professional Journalists and chair of SPJ’s subcommittee on campus crime, said she believes Georgia will pass a law in the 2006 legislative session to define campus police records as public documents. A similar proposal was approved unanimously this year by a Georgia legislative committee but didn’t make it to full approval before the end of the session. If the bill passes, Carlson said, “I’m hopeful it will spread to other states and across the country.” Many states are beginning to realize that all police agencies need to be held to the same standards, she said.
A survey by the Weekly of large private universities in Texas showed wide disparities in public-records policies — and thus in what information students and their families receive about campus crime.
The Weekly sent letters to police departments at 11 schools, requesting information on sexual assault crimes on those campuses. The information requested went beyond what the schools are required to report under the Clery Act. Only one college, Abilene Christian University, released the same kind of information that public universities would be required to disclose.
Three other universities — Hardin-Simmons, Lubbock Christian, and Fort Worth’s Texas Wesleyan University — replied that they had no sexual assault reports to release. Austin’s St. Edward’s University denied the request but also asked Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott for a ruling on the issue. The other six — TCU, SMU, Baylor, Rice, and St. Mary’s and Trinity colleges in San Antonio — refused to release any records.
Most of the last group replied promptly to the Weekly’s request; TCU wavered. When approached by a student for information on sexual assault cases, TCU officials provided some of the requested records. “We try to meet anybody’s request for information,” one official told student journalist Melissa Christensen. “We don’t withhold information.” However, many of the reports Christensen had requested (on behalf of the Weekly’s investigation) were missing.
When the newspaper requested information on such crimes directly, TCU police refused. The college’s attorneys wrote that the university is not subject to the Texas Open Records Act; they cited a 1993 ruling by the state attorney general that said the hiring of security officers by a private college “does not make the campus police department a governmental body.”
The sole open-records test in Texas is whether the university police department accepts public funds, said attorney Joel White, president of the Freedom of Information Foundation of Texas.
Carlson said this gap in the law is absurd. “It’s dangerous [to have] private police forces acting with all the power of public forces but behind closed doors,” the SPJ leader said. Police forces that are performing public functions should be treated equally by the law, she said. “If university police departments have the power to arrest, charge, and detain, it only makes sense that they have the same responsibilities as public police.”
Allowing an agency that exercises police powers to avoid public scrutiny is very dangerous in a democratic society, Carlson said. “We’ve decided in this country that open government is the best government,” she said. “I think this same principle flows right down to our schools. ... This shouldn’t be an issue of whose money is paying their salary, it should be an issue of what functions they’re performing.”
Donaldson, the FOI Foundation board member, said that requiring private university police departments to comply with open-records laws would not be a great burden. They would simply have to be more open with the information they already have, he said.
At Abilene Christian, Police Chief Jimmy Ellison said in a letter that his department released some of the information the Weekly requested, even though it didn’t have to under law, “in cooperative concern regarding campus crime, safety and awareness issues.”
Ellison said awareness is a valuable tool in fighting campus crime. “Just because the institution that we serve is a private university, I feel it would be unfair for us to provide any less service or awareness than our counterparts at public universities,” he wrote. He said his department works hard to overcome the image of some campus police departments, especially at private universities, that hide information or fail to properly investigate crimes. “Certainly no police department is perfect, but we try to do a good job for everyone and keep the 5,000 sons and daughters entrusted to us as safe as possible,” Ellison wrote. The availability of crime records is one factor in the safety equation, he said.
Wicklund said she’s encouraged by the legislation in Georgia that would change the situation, even if it’s not happening in Texas yet. “It’s important that they keep forcing police to be open with their records,” she said. “We have a right to know when and where and why something happened — we want the full story.”
Until the law is changed, Wicklund said, she and her staff at the Skiff will continue to have to work harder to get less information for crime stories than their student-journalist counterparts at public universities.
“We do half our job as journalists when we don’t have all the information that we could if we were allowed to see the police reports like at public schools,” Wicklund said, “and in turn, the student body is short-changed, and it perpetuates the secrecy that surrounds crime on these campuses.”
Kristi Walker, a recent TCU graduate, believes private schools would do a service to their students if they released more extensive crime reports. She said she was sexually harassed on campus, and she’s outraged that the law does not require private university police departments to make crime records, especially rape reports, available to the public. The self-defense classes TCU offers aren’t enough, Walker said — students have to be mentally prepared to confront crime. “The information police have could help keep us alert,” she said, “and help students remember that those things can and do happen on college campuses — even private ones.”
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